Project
by Athirah Ridzal
How do different colonial powers affect government quality of colonised countries?
The main aim of this project is to observe patterns in government quality emerging from countries under the same colonial powers.
This project is motivated by the paper The Quality of Government by La Porta et al. (1999), that concluded that legal origins is a major factor of
government quality. The research question is explored through different measures of government quality based on former colonies of the British,
Spanish and Russian empires. The visualisations used in this project are scatter plots, bar and line charts with sliders and drop-down lists to condense
the dataset into a single chart. The value of each observation can be found by hovering over the charts.
Data
The data for this project is mainly from the World Bank downloaded using Python in Colab using the API, and datasets from other sources are downloaded
directly from TCdata360. The datasets are cleaned and merged using Stata. The selected sample for the former colonies for the Russian empire were countries
under the Soviet Union state, whereas for the British
and Spanish are a random selection of countries
that were previously colonised by the respective empires. Colonisation by different empires can occurred simultaneously in different areas of a country, therefore
the selected sample of countries are defined by the colonisation of the whole land.
Income and Inequality
Based on the chart, former colonies of the British and Spanish exhibit the anticipated trend of lower inequality for high-income countries, with the
Spanish having relatively higher inequality. Unexpectedly, for the Russian category, the countries have lower inequality and lower income per capita.
Political Freedom
Countries colonised by the Spanish generally have lower legal right scores, but relatively freer press, while colonies under the Russian category have
higher legal rights index. Unexpectedly, by 2017 and onward, the relationship looks almost positively related, where higher legal rights correlates to less free press.
Perceived Corruption
This visualisation describes the relationship of lower perceived corruption correlating to higher income per capita with a regression of polynomial order of 3.
Countries under the British and Spanish category vary across both variables, while under the Russian empire, the countries have higher perceived corruption and
hence lower GDP per capita. The regressed fitted line was created in Colab.
Financing Public Goods
This visualisation plots the tax burden, where the highest values are taken up by developed economies. Although, no specific patterns emerge for developed nor
developing economies for any colonial empire. Typically, higher financing is coupled with higher outcomes of public goods.
Output of Public Goods
These three visualisations plot the outputs of basic public goods – healthcare, infrastructure and education. Each visualisation includes two separate charts,
one of the whole dataset and the other of developing countries, as the higher outcomes of public goods are dominated by developed economies. As expected, the tax
burden data matches the outcomes of public goods – countries with higher tax burden have
higher outputs in public goods.
Countries under the British category varies largely with relatively higher infant mortality compared to Spanish and Russian. Former Spanish colonies have
higher mortality than former Russian colonies. The drop-down list allows the selection of an empire, where any patterns of the countries can be observed.
Former colonies of the Russian empire have relatively higher secure internet servers per 1 million, whereas the other two are scattered countries across the ranks.
Secondary school enrolment for countries under the Russian empire are also relatively higher than the British and Spanish that have high variations across countries.
The drop-down list allows the selection of an empire, where any patterns of enrolment can be observed amongst the countries.
Conclusion
These visualisations revealed minor grouped patterns emerging for each colonial empire, more so under the Russian. This grouped effect on former colonies of the
Russian empire is likely since the countries gained independence most recently in 1991 and the Soviet Union operated as a single country rather than the common
definition of colonialism of foreign political control. Surprisingly, countries under the British show the least similarities, showing high variation across variables
even though most of the countries gained independence in the mid-20th century. Therefore, colonial empires do impact the government quality of the colonies in
varying ways – relatively higher inequality, freer press or higher outcomes of public goods. Nonetheless, every country has different resources, experienced
varying degrees of economic crisis and have accumulated centuries of history and culture. These visualisations are only able to describe one factor that affects
the variation in government quality over the years. High-income countries exhibit higher government quality, perhaps in future exploration on government quality
and colonisation, the countries can be further divided into different income categories. As well as, further research on the Soviet Union as the first visualisation
showed that the countries have low inequality albeit with lower income per capita.